Retiree Boomers and half-retired Boomers bringing their cancer with them. Like what happened to Vermont following the communist urban decay in the 196s0-80s: rich white commies moved permanently to their vacation homes in VT to leave the urbant squalor of NYC, Harftord, Albany, and Boston.
VT was once famously Norman Rockwell Yankee Republican with zero D's in it, as given by this classic joke from 1954's White Christmas:
But VT became blue after the rich commies ran to the hills in the 1960s-1990s and voted in parasitic trash like Bernie Sanders. Something like half of all the "small Vermont towns" didn't exist 60 years ago but the rich folks created them when they moved there to get away from "urban crime" and "teen crime".
But the old VTers and the new VTers met a compromise: the Old VTers would let Burlington become a commie drug-den full of hippies so long the commies did not try to import blacks or mess with the 2nd-Amendment. The new rich commies agreed. And so here we are with a deep-blue VT being a place where no permit is required to buy a firearm.
Excellent analysis. Michael Barone would be in full agreement with you. For over a century, Vermont's population hovered around 400,000. Now it is about 600,000. Lefties like Bernie Sanders, Howard Dean and Reeve Lindbergh settled in Vermont and skewed the old Yankee vote. On top of that, old Yankee Vermonters were never very religious and probably were ill at ease with the Christian strength in the national Republican Party.
Also with so few Blacks their image of Blacks came entirely from the Hollywood bosses. Just like in Europe where people in past decades saw few Blacks and thought Blacks were oppressed in the U.S. like Hollywood showed, exploited by the capitalists while their wages were kept low, so that's why there were Black gangs. Affirmative Action doesn't exist in this worldview. In Hollywood productions, rapists are Whites and Blacks protect the victims. Like in Moulin Rouge, the rich White man tries to rape the main character but she is saved by the Black. Vermonters like Europeans must have seen all this and thought the Southerners were terrible oppressors.
Or Morgan Freeman: Wise, worldly, somewhat tired of all this, but still willing to listen to your "educated fool" comments before bringing down the verbiage to teach you something.
Or Denzel. Or Obama, who fashioned himself as Denzel-meets-Poitier.
The 2008 Donk primary between Obama and Hillary showed this quite starkly. Obama got either the Southern states where most Donks are black, or the Whitopias with very few blacks. Hillary got the states in between, where most Donks were still white but were more personally acquainted with blacks.
Not sure it’s necessarily religiosity. Vermont Yankees seem to share their distaste for Trump’s “ickiness” with one of the most religious groups in the country: Mormons.
Well, the Mormons, not any Protestants, are the heirs of New England religious conservatism. Orthodox Protestantism and the old Religious Right owe a lot to Continental Protestants whose view of “public education” was more like the Catholics. The intellectual leadership of Classical Protestantism is heavily Dutch-American.
scott the squish is not quite the rock ribbed republican 2a defender i would like but given the state has gone strait trotsky guess we gotta live with it.
Indeed, we hear little about gun laws these days. It seems the Dems have lost that issue.
Much like in the past leftists all over the West would call for abolishing nuclear power and nuclear weapons (to empoverish and disarm the West before the Soviet Union), but leftists won't campaign on that anymore. Not even the communist parties.
They don't campaign about drastically reducing the military either. Or abolishing military service in the countries that have it. Because the leaders and donors are all-in on the wars against pro-Palestinian countries.
Likewise they no longer talk about the world running out of minerals (there was a list with the years we'd run out of copper, aluminium, etc, but the years came and went), running out of oil, the ozone layer growing to swallow all, acid rain (this rain was included in the book Blade Runner is based on because it was a big thing back then), exploding power plants, suffocating because of disappearing rain forests (which consume almost as much oxygen as they produce), shale drilling causing earthquakes, global cooling (pollution would cover the sky, block out the sun and cause the polar ice to grow, until it reached "a critical mass"). But I guess all of this was changed to the more hazy "climate change."
> "we hear little about gun laws these days. It seems the Dems have lost that issue."
They're still on it: constant lawfare, sneaky legislation, malicious prosecutions, etc. The main break they're waiting for is to get a one-vote majority on the Supreme Court so they can just redefine gun rights out existence.
> "They don't campaign about drastically reducing the military either. Or abolishing military service in the countries that have it."
They've found they can just repopulate the military with their own people. They might not win in an actual fight, but that turns out not to matter for most of their purposes.
Indeed, on a local level. The couple who stood on their lawn with their guns when the BLM mob approached. They were demonized by the media. The media wouldn't show that the Black rioters had first broken down a metal gate to get in to the area. The couple was prosecuted by a Black and freed, as I recall, but being demonized and being prosecuted at all is a very heavy toll. Just like Rittenhouse - even when he was freed, this means months of worries, your whole family being targeted, your name is on the internet and that will cripple you socially and financially for life.
So the tactic is that you can have guns, but if you use them to defend yourself against Blacks you can still have your life ruined.
Though to be correct, tens of thousands or more than a hundred thousand people a year defend themselves from robbers, rapists and murderers by having guns. (In most cases they only have to show the gun. And we have no statistics on how many times robbers have refrained from targeting a house or an area in the first place because they know it's more likely that people are armed there. In the cases when a gun is fired in self-defense it usually doesn't hit. And in the minority of cases where it does hit it's usually not lethal - you actually have to fire several times with a handgun for it to be lethal, most of the time.)
They just elected rabid, one-issue anti-gunner David Hogg (the Parkland high school student opportunist and son of an FBI agent) V.P. of the DNC. They are certainly not done AT ALL with the gun grabs.
> "so long the commies did not try to import blacks or mess with the 2nd-Amendment."
They should have got that in writing, with a strong enforcement clause. Now the commies are importing blacks, just not American ones. Last time I was in [Vermont town] it was full idle Somalis and their multitudinous broods. Actually, regular American blacks were starting to show up too, mostly as part of the growing drug trade.
As for 2A, they're content to let the next commie administration pack the Supreme Court and end gun rights nationally by judicial fiat.
I always assumed Vermont Republicans were the old-guard liberal types that would be called “cuckservative” today, and who have been progressively voting Democrat more and more over the years at the Presidential level. Vermont was the only state to choose Nikki Haley over Trump in 2024’s GOP primary, along with the Swamp.
Most old Yankee Republicans are more Bush than Trump, of course. They were the ancient American WASP elitists, and Trump was a populist. The hoi polloi were the dirty Ellis Island kids, while the old Mayflower crew believed in rule by Brahmins (many of whom set up the Deep State and Administrative State during the FDR reign).
However, the old blue collar and hillbilly VTers (the majority of the people pre-the 1960s) were the kind of Trump voters we find all over. NH never got quite as run over as fast as VT, so NH remained red/swing for a long time. However, its recent turn to light blue is due to D's from Boston being priced out of the suburbs of the metro area and moving to new developments just across the border (its only about a 45-1hr drive from the NH border to Boston. Even with traffic, its usually 1.5-2hrs, with most of the traffic being the last 5 miles or so into Boston).
Yeah, Benjamin's book was hilarious. Expecting dirty looks and racists spitting venom his way, instead all he found was kind, welcoming, and engaging white folk, happy to show him how they lived and how much fun their various whitebread diversions could be.
I wonder if the big move in Hispanic politics is driven by three variables. First, Hispanics who have roots in America over a century and more tend to vote similarly as the Anglo-Whites. This is especially true in Texas. Second, Hispanics with little Indian blood vote Republican and Hispanics with a lot of Indian blood vote Democrat. Hispanics with black blood are strong Democrats. Third, Hispanics who consider themselves white are very likely to vote Republican.
Almost all Dominicans in America have some black blood in them. Ninety percent of Dominicans in the Dominican Republican have some black blood. Haiti took over the Dominican Republic for about twenty-five years in the early 19th Century and I imagine there was a lot of race-mixing, voluntary and involuntary. A large amount of Puerto Ricans living in Puerto Rico have no black blood, about 35 %. I would guess the percentage of Puerto Ricans with no black blood living in America is higher but I say that only anecdotally. One of my best friends growing up was half-Puerto Rican and distinctively white. His mother was clearly Hispanic but white.
The Washington state metros have an interesting pattern too: far enough from Seattle to isolate yourself from its dysfunction, but close enough that it's not a great burden to go into the office 1 or 2 days a week.
Anacortes and Olympia are a bit over an hour north and southwest, respectively, and Bremerton's a 45 minute ferry ride west across Puget Sound.
I am in Gold Bar Wa, North and East of Seattle. Pretty much at the outer commuting limit. I would make it into Redmond, Bellevue, or Issaquah in an hour and a half during rush hour. Somewhat longer to Seattle. Everett in an hour. 30 years ago when I used to commute into NYC from NJ, my commute was longer. When I had kids in school, I lived in the Issaquah area with their excellent public schools - something I cannot say about Gold Bar / Sultan. I still work remotely, but have excellent hiking within minutes drive. I am sure there is a small Hispanic community here, but I don't know how many members of other subgroups there are, probably not many.
Yeah, I live in Leelanau County, adjacent to Traverse City. The farms are slowly giving way to the estates of the newly arrived from all over the midwest, but also CA and NY. The home prices shot up 400% after covid. At any rate, this is what it's like: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/brouhaha-at-the-council
Actor Jeff Daniels is a busy man. When he's not playing great Americans in movies like "Gettysburg", he's a champion for racial justice. He appeared on Stephen Colbert and gave an impassioned speech about Black Lives Matter. He called for a "new America", declaring that America must be totally rebuilt to purge it of its racism. The studio audience was so moved that they barely let him finish before bursting into applause.
But even Jeff Daniels needs his downtime. He makes his home in a beautiful little town called Chelsea, Michigan. Chelsea is known for its history, vibrant arts scene, and natural beauty.
Just one small, insignificant detail about Chelsea: the town is 95% white and less than 1% black. Surely Jeff is unaware of this. Why would a champion for racial justice choose to live in a place that's so regrettably, egregiously, unforgivably white?
I was making a delivery in the Finger Lakes region of New York in 2020. I was surprised by all the hand-painted BLM signs. Didn't see any black people in that area, though.
Steve, you're going to have to do something about these AI's. Perplexity:
The search results provided do not support the claim that Rich Benjamin discovered he enjoyed shooting and golf and decided to stay in the "Whitopias" he studied. His work was primarily an anthropological study of demographic trends and racial dynamics in predominantly white communities
Easy solution: Trump should open "temporary shelter" for ailens in those cities: like what D did with Haitians (and DeSantis hal-ass attempted in Martha's Vineyards), but for Dems.
It is always worth mentioning though that despite shifts to analyze, the majority of non-Whites ALWAYS vote Left. In EVERY Western country. No matter how much cuckservatives use the extra percentage of GOP voters to praise and drool over Blacks and browns, to show they are not "racist." The majority of Latinos, Asians, Indians, and of course Jews and Blacks, are always leftist.
Someone made a good comparison of Mexicans in the U.S. with voters in Mexico. When they make more money, more vote Right to keep that money. But still the majority are leftist, decade after decade.
The conclusion was something like, "The GOP will win every fourth time or so when it's too much corruption in office and filth in the streets, time to clean out, and then it's back to the Democrats."
>>Democrats had pushed all their chips in on blacks (and trans), and that Hispanic-Americans were of little interest to liberals anymore
Which I believe is because of Blacks demanding, and getting, higher positions in media like the NYT. A counter-productive focus for the Left, but they do a lot of counter-productive stuff.
I think the older, white crowd is still tuning into traditional news sources, as opposed to the younger going to Twitter and such. You know, the ones that have been blaring "Orange Man Bad" for over eight years. And the one that doctors and edits interviews with preferred presidential candidates.
I clicked the Searching for Whitopia link, it goes to the Amazon page and includes the following in the description:
"Benjamin's groundbreaking study is one of few to have illuminated in advance the social and political forces propelling the rise of Donald Trump. After all, Trump carried 94 percent of America's Whitopian counties. And he won a median 67 percent of the vote in Whitopia compared to 46 percent of the vote nationwide."
What data are they looking at exactly? Must have a different definition of Whitopia than what Steve is referring to here. I thought of it as affluent white suburbs, which are certainly not bastions of Trump support.
This chart of the pro-D swing in Grand Junction, Asheville, Bend, etc. seems to contradict that famous CNN election-aftermath video that Kamala didn't improve the D vote in any counties vs. Biden.
Really the biggest instinct of the white Kamala fans in these locations seems to be gatekeeping - physically, culturally, and politically.
Great article! And that little golf hole is fantastic.
Retiree Boomers and half-retired Boomers bringing their cancer with them. Like what happened to Vermont following the communist urban decay in the 196s0-80s: rich white commies moved permanently to their vacation homes in VT to leave the urbant squalor of NYC, Harftord, Albany, and Boston.
VT was once famously Norman Rockwell Yankee Republican with zero D's in it, as given by this classic joke from 1954's White Christmas:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P0ovii4DI8
But VT became blue after the rich commies ran to the hills in the 1960s-1990s and voted in parasitic trash like Bernie Sanders. Something like half of all the "small Vermont towns" didn't exist 60 years ago but the rich folks created them when they moved there to get away from "urban crime" and "teen crime".
But the old VTers and the new VTers met a compromise: the Old VTers would let Burlington become a commie drug-den full of hippies so long the commies did not try to import blacks or mess with the 2nd-Amendment. The new rich commies agreed. And so here we are with a deep-blue VT being a place where no permit is required to buy a firearm.
Excellent analysis. Michael Barone would be in full agreement with you. For over a century, Vermont's population hovered around 400,000. Now it is about 600,000. Lefties like Bernie Sanders, Howard Dean and Reeve Lindbergh settled in Vermont and skewed the old Yankee vote. On top of that, old Yankee Vermonters were never very religious and probably were ill at ease with the Christian strength in the national Republican Party.
Also with so few Blacks their image of Blacks came entirely from the Hollywood bosses. Just like in Europe where people in past decades saw few Blacks and thought Blacks were oppressed in the U.S. like Hollywood showed, exploited by the capitalists while their wages were kept low, so that's why there were Black gangs. Affirmative Action doesn't exist in this worldview. In Hollywood productions, rapists are Whites and Blacks protect the victims. Like in Moulin Rouge, the rich White man tries to rape the main character but she is saved by the Black. Vermonters like Europeans must have seen all this and thought the Southerners were terrible oppressors.
For some whites isolated from blacks, all blacks are Sidney Portier. Nice. Well-mannered. Polite.
Or Morgan Freeman: Wise, worldly, somewhat tired of all this, but still willing to listen to your "educated fool" comments before bringing down the verbiage to teach you something.
Or Denzel. Or Obama, who fashioned himself as Denzel-meets-Poitier.
The 2008 Donk primary between Obama and Hillary showed this quite starkly. Obama got either the Southern states where most Donks are black, or the Whitopias with very few blacks. Hillary got the states in between, where most Donks were still white but were more personally acquainted with blacks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries
Not sure it’s necessarily religiosity. Vermont Yankees seem to share their distaste for Trump’s “ickiness” with one of the most religious groups in the country: Mormons.
Well, the Mormons, not any Protestants, are the heirs of New England religious conservatism. Orthodox Protestantism and the old Religious Right owe a lot to Continental Protestants whose view of “public education” was more like the Catholics. The intellectual leadership of Classical Protestantism is heavily Dutch-American.
scott the squish is not quite the rock ribbed republican 2a defender i would like but given the state has gone strait trotsky guess we gotta live with it.
me be vt trustafarian of 40+ years
Maine has faced a similar influx of Dems from Massachusetts.
why firearm permit in any state? how about blog post permits. ;)
Indeed, we hear little about gun laws these days. It seems the Dems have lost that issue.
Much like in the past leftists all over the West would call for abolishing nuclear power and nuclear weapons (to empoverish and disarm the West before the Soviet Union), but leftists won't campaign on that anymore. Not even the communist parties.
They don't campaign about drastically reducing the military either. Or abolishing military service in the countries that have it. Because the leaders and donors are all-in on the wars against pro-Palestinian countries.
Likewise they no longer talk about the world running out of minerals (there was a list with the years we'd run out of copper, aluminium, etc, but the years came and went), running out of oil, the ozone layer growing to swallow all, acid rain (this rain was included in the book Blade Runner is based on because it was a big thing back then), exploding power plants, suffocating because of disappearing rain forests (which consume almost as much oxygen as they produce), shale drilling causing earthquakes, global cooling (pollution would cover the sky, block out the sun and cause the polar ice to grow, until it reached "a critical mass"). But I guess all of this was changed to the more hazy "climate change."
> "we hear little about gun laws these days. It seems the Dems have lost that issue."
They're still on it: constant lawfare, sneaky legislation, malicious prosecutions, etc. The main break they're waiting for is to get a one-vote majority on the Supreme Court so they can just redefine gun rights out existence.
> "They don't campaign about drastically reducing the military either. Or abolishing military service in the countries that have it."
They've found they can just repopulate the military with their own people. They might not win in an actual fight, but that turns out not to matter for most of their purposes.
Indeed, on a local level. The couple who stood on their lawn with their guns when the BLM mob approached. They were demonized by the media. The media wouldn't show that the Black rioters had first broken down a metal gate to get in to the area. The couple was prosecuted by a Black and freed, as I recall, but being demonized and being prosecuted at all is a very heavy toll. Just like Rittenhouse - even when he was freed, this means months of worries, your whole family being targeted, your name is on the internet and that will cripple you socially and financially for life.
So the tactic is that you can have guns, but if you use them to defend yourself against Blacks you can still have your life ruined.
Though to be correct, tens of thousands or more than a hundred thousand people a year defend themselves from robbers, rapists and murderers by having guns. (In most cases they only have to show the gun. And we have no statistics on how many times robbers have refrained from targeting a house or an area in the first place because they know it's more likely that people are armed there. In the cases when a gun is fired in self-defense it usually doesn't hit. And in the minority of cases where it does hit it's usually not lethal - you actually have to fire several times with a handgun for it to be lethal, most of the time.)
They just elected rabid, one-issue anti-gunner David Hogg (the Parkland high school student opportunist and son of an FBI agent) V.P. of the DNC. They are certainly not done AT ALL with the gun grabs.
> "so long the commies did not try to import blacks or mess with the 2nd-Amendment."
They should have got that in writing, with a strong enforcement clause. Now the commies are importing blacks, just not American ones. Last time I was in [Vermont town] it was full idle Somalis and their multitudinous broods. Actually, regular American blacks were starting to show up too, mostly as part of the growing drug trade.
As for 2A, they're content to let the next commie administration pack the Supreme Court and end gun rights nationally by judicial fiat.
Enjoyed that VT history. Please do Maine!
I always assumed Vermont Republicans were the old-guard liberal types that would be called “cuckservative” today, and who have been progressively voting Democrat more and more over the years at the Presidential level. Vermont was the only state to choose Nikki Haley over Trump in 2024’s GOP primary, along with the Swamp.
Most old Yankee Republicans are more Bush than Trump, of course. They were the ancient American WASP elitists, and Trump was a populist. The hoi polloi were the dirty Ellis Island kids, while the old Mayflower crew believed in rule by Brahmins (many of whom set up the Deep State and Administrative State during the FDR reign).
However, the old blue collar and hillbilly VTers (the majority of the people pre-the 1960s) were the kind of Trump voters we find all over. NH never got quite as run over as fast as VT, so NH remained red/swing for a long time. However, its recent turn to light blue is due to D's from Boston being priced out of the suburbs of the metro area and moving to new developments just across the border (its only about a 45-1hr drive from the NH border to Boston. Even with traffic, its usually 1.5-2hrs, with most of the traffic being the last 5 miles or so into Boston).
Yeah, Benjamin's book was hilarious. Expecting dirty looks and racists spitting venom his way, instead all he found was kind, welcoming, and engaging white folk, happy to show him how they lived and how much fun their various whitebread diversions could be.
It's almost like white people actually just hate criminal activity, not black people.
I wonder if the big move in Hispanic politics is driven by three variables. First, Hispanics who have roots in America over a century and more tend to vote similarly as the Anglo-Whites. This is especially true in Texas. Second, Hispanics with little Indian blood vote Republican and Hispanics with a lot of Indian blood vote Democrat. Hispanics with black blood are strong Democrats. Third, Hispanics who consider themselves white are very likely to vote Republican.
"Hispanics with black blood are strong Democrats."
That seemed true my whole life, but then in 2024, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans appear to have shifted a lot toward Trump. A trend or a one time thing?
Almost all Dominicans in America have some black blood in them. Ninety percent of Dominicans in the Dominican Republican have some black blood. Haiti took over the Dominican Republic for about twenty-five years in the early 19th Century and I imagine there was a lot of race-mixing, voluntary and involuntary. A large amount of Puerto Ricans living in Puerto Rico have no black blood, about 35 %. I would guess the percentage of Puerto Ricans with no black blood living in America is higher but I say that only anecdotally. One of my best friends growing up was half-Puerto Rican and distinctively white. His mother was clearly Hispanic but white.
The Washington state metros have an interesting pattern too: far enough from Seattle to isolate yourself from its dysfunction, but close enough that it's not a great burden to go into the office 1 or 2 days a week.
Anacortes and Olympia are a bit over an hour north and southwest, respectively, and Bremerton's a 45 minute ferry ride west across Puget Sound.
I am in Gold Bar Wa, North and East of Seattle. Pretty much at the outer commuting limit. I would make it into Redmond, Bellevue, or Issaquah in an hour and a half during rush hour. Somewhat longer to Seattle. Everett in an hour. 30 years ago when I used to commute into NYC from NJ, my commute was longer. When I had kids in school, I lived in the Issaquah area with their excellent public schools - something I cannot say about Gold Bar / Sultan. I still work remotely, but have excellent hiking within minutes drive. I am sure there is a small Hispanic community here, but I don't know how many members of other subgroups there are, probably not many.
Yeah, I live in Leelanau County, adjacent to Traverse City. The farms are slowly giving way to the estates of the newly arrived from all over the midwest, but also CA and NY. The home prices shot up 400% after covid. At any rate, this is what it's like: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/brouhaha-at-the-council
Actor Jeff Daniels is a busy man. When he's not playing great Americans in movies like "Gettysburg", he's a champion for racial justice. He appeared on Stephen Colbert and gave an impassioned speech about Black Lives Matter. He called for a "new America", declaring that America must be totally rebuilt to purge it of its racism. The studio audience was so moved that they barely let him finish before bursting into applause.
But even Jeff Daniels needs his downtime. He makes his home in a beautiful little town called Chelsea, Michigan. Chelsea is known for its history, vibrant arts scene, and natural beauty.
Just one small, insignificant detail about Chelsea: the town is 95% white and less than 1% black. Surely Jeff is unaware of this. Why would a champion for racial justice choose to live in a place that's so regrettably, egregiously, unforgivably white?
https://youtu.be/6QEv4abeTe4
You said
chainsaw Latino
I expected some action 🤷
I was making a delivery in the Finger Lakes region of New York in 2020. I was surprised by all the hand-painted BLM signs. Didn't see any black people in that area, though.
Steve, you're going to have to do something about these AI's. Perplexity:
The search results provided do not support the claim that Rich Benjamin discovered he enjoyed shooting and golf and decided to stay in the "Whitopias" he studied. His work was primarily an anthropological study of demographic trends and racial dynamics in predominantly white communities
Easy solution: Trump should open "temporary shelter" for ailens in those cities: like what D did with Haitians (and DeSantis hal-ass attempted in Martha's Vineyards), but for Dems.
It is always worth mentioning though that despite shifts to analyze, the majority of non-Whites ALWAYS vote Left. In EVERY Western country. No matter how much cuckservatives use the extra percentage of GOP voters to praise and drool over Blacks and browns, to show they are not "racist." The majority of Latinos, Asians, Indians, and of course Jews and Blacks, are always leftist.
Someone made a good comparison of Mexicans in the U.S. with voters in Mexico. When they make more money, more vote Right to keep that money. But still the majority are leftist, decade after decade.
The conclusion was something like, "The GOP will win every fourth time or so when it's too much corruption in office and filth in the streets, time to clean out, and then it's back to the Democrats."
>>Democrats had pushed all their chips in on blacks (and trans), and that Hispanic-Americans were of little interest to liberals anymore
Which I believe is because of Blacks demanding, and getting, higher positions in media like the NYT. A counter-productive focus for the Left, but they do a lot of counter-productive stuff.
I think the older, white crowd is still tuning into traditional news sources, as opposed to the younger going to Twitter and such. You know, the ones that have been blaring "Orange Man Bad" for over eight years. And the one that doctors and edits interviews with preferred presidential candidates.
I clicked the Searching for Whitopia link, it goes to the Amazon page and includes the following in the description:
"Benjamin's groundbreaking study is one of few to have illuminated in advance the social and political forces propelling the rise of Donald Trump. After all, Trump carried 94 percent of America's Whitopian counties. And he won a median 67 percent of the vote in Whitopia compared to 46 percent of the vote nationwide."
What data are they looking at exactly? Must have a different definition of Whitopia than what Steve is referring to here. I thought of it as affluent white suburbs, which are certainly not bastions of Trump support.
This chart of the pro-D swing in Grand Junction, Asheville, Bend, etc. seems to contradict that famous CNN election-aftermath video that Kamala didn't improve the D vote in any counties vs. Biden.
https://x.com/abigailmarone/status/1854161985501356390
Was CNN's software faulty? Or did the rest of Bend's county counteract the Bend effect?
EDIT: I see fact-checkers saying the CNN software had a threshold of 3% improvement, but Grand Junction and Ashville both swung by more than 3%.